WORCESTER — Once the site of one of the city's more popular restaurants, the former El Morocco Restaurant, perched atop the hill at the end of Wall Street, is going to be razed to make way for a housing development.

The Planning Board Wednesday night unanimously approved plans for the construction of a three-story, 59-unit apartment building at 100 Wall St.

Acorn Allocations LLC, a Shrewsbury-based company, is the developer and owner of the 1.8-acre property.

The new building is going to have a footprint that is roughly 20,800 square feet.

To make way for that, the roughly 12,000-square-foot, one-story restaurant building will be razed, according to Michael Andrade of Graves Engineering.

The apartment building will have 16 one-bedroom units and 43 two-bedroom units, Mr. Andrade said.

He said there will be 119 parking spaces on site; there were 125 parking spaces for the restaurant.

The site is considerably overgrown and the restaurant building has fallen into disrepair after being vacant for more than a dozen years.

City planners expressed concern about the lack of open space for such a high-density residential development.

The city's policy calls for having at least 40 square feet of open space on the site per dwelling unit; in this instance, that would amount to nearly 2,400 square feet. But the project plans did not come close to meeting that.

Because it is just a policy, the developer does not need a variance or special permit if the project does not meet the benchmark. City officials said community space inside the building could be included in the open space calculation.

Mr. Andrade told the board that efforts will be made to modify the plans to create as much open space as possible.

Lynne Ritacco, who lives at 13 Shale St. behind the development site, raised questions about the height of the new building.

"We have a pretty nice view of the city and I wonder how much of it will be obstructed (by the three-story building)," she said.

Meanwhile, Marshall Farmelant, president of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, which has a building around the corner from the development site at 53 Norfolk St., said he hoped there was going to be enough parking on-site.

He said Wall and Norfolk streets cannot handle a large amount of overflow parking.

Mr. Andrade said the developer is providing one more space than what is required under the city's zoning ordinance.

El Morocco, founded by the Aboody family, was one of the city's legendary gathering places. It originally opened in 1943 inside an apartment house, and then relocated in 1977 to a new building across the street at 100 Wall St.

The popular 200-seat restaurant and nightclub attracted many stars in the fields of stage, screen and music who were performing in Worcester or Boston.

The El, as it was known, closed in 1994, but the building was reborn in January 2000 when it re-opened as a new restaurant and nightclub, Il Palazzo. But the building was foreclosed on again in July 2001 and has sat empty since.

In 2008, a developer proposed razing the restaurant and constructing a six-story, 90-unit apartment building, but the plan ran into strong opposition from neighborhood residents on Grafton Hill, who said the building would block the view of the city they had long enjoyed.

City planning officials also expressed concerns about the impact of the height of the building on the surrounding neighborhood, which is primarily residential.

That proposal ended up going nowhere.

Contact Nick Kotsopoulos at nicholas.kotsopoulos@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @NCKotsopoulos

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